It’s Nice That (INT): How did you first hear about the Heated Rivalry gig, and why was it one you personally wanted to work on?
Jackson Parrell (JP): I first heard about it from Jacob. We’re both Canadian, and it’s a small-ish scene. I didn’t know the name at that point, he just said it was based on a series of smutty books about hockey that he loved and was interested in adapting.
A few weeks or months later I got a call from my agent saying Heated Rivalry, and that’s when I first got the scripts, and I was so hooked. Everyone had been telling me Jacob is like a really good writer, but to actually read them, I knew it was going to be special. I went into that interview ready as hell and excited as I could be, with a massive visuals pitch deck.
INT: So many people say how expensive Heated Rivalry looks, but it’s quite literally the opposite, being made on a relatively small budget. So how did you achieve its really beautiful, striking look? What tools, vision and planning was involved?
JP: It’s definitely one of the lowest-budget projects, if not the lowest-budget episodic project I’ve ever shot. Even by Canadian standards it’s shockingly low! There’s only really one way you can approach a low-budget project, which is to just play to your strengths. If you get mired in trying to use a resource that you can’t afford or a location that you can’t get, and then you try to shoehorn that into a lower-budget world, it inevitably ends up looking cheap, and then you’ve lost it.
There’s scenes where one of the boys would pull up in a Maserati, and that would have to go – we couldn’t afford to rent a Maserati for a day. We had to think – what is the core of that beat? – and if the core of the beat is showing affluence, we just had to do it another way.
INT: So it rides on being open to adaptation?
JP: Yeah, and always wanting to find that thread of beauty, trying to find that little element of ‘greatness’. The tunnel scene is a perfect example of that. We found that tunnel and just made it everything – there was nothing left for that tunnel to give, we took everything it had!
INT: Literally, a tunnel has never looked so stunning. I also read that you’d already shot the sunset scene in the final episode, but then there was a better sunset, so you went back and did it again.
JP: That scene is a really good example of playing to strengths – because it was so worth it redoing. It was so beautiful; to not have had that in the episode would have been heartbreaking to me.